Tales Of The Lost
by Chris7221
Summary: A spiritual successor to Emergence of sorts, ties into the fanime The Lost Kingdom (yes it's real). These are side stories, alternate perspectives, and tangents offering insights, backstory, and entertainment. DAY ZERO: Two ordinary days go horribly wrong in a world that will never be the same.
1. Day Zero In America

What is this?

Tales Of The Lost is a tie-in to my big project- well, one of my big projects- a RWBY fanime (possibly the first, definitely the best) called The Lost Kingdom. You can find it on DailyMotion, and it does have its own website (just thelostkingdom, on a free tk domain, you'll know it's the right one because it looks like the 1990s). I've done two episodes so far, with a whole season planned and the third episode in production. It's not set in the Emergence-verse, but is rather a spiritual successor with some similar themes and ideas.

Tales Of The Lost is in a similar vein to the Asides I wrote for Emergence. These are side stories, extra background, and humour tangents related to the main story. Most of them won't make sense on their own, some will help fill out the lore of The Lost Kingdom. Unless otherwise noted, all are canon and all are written by me.

I'm kicking this off with a pair of entries that go back to before it all began, setting up key background events from two very different perspectives. I suggest watching the first episode of The Lost Kingdom first before reading these, although reading both then watching the first episode probably works too.

* * *

 **Tales Of The Lost**

 **Day Zero In America**

For Robert Joesph Donovan, the day began much the same as any other. His alarm went off at 7:00 AM, he snoozed it once and then dragged himself out of bed ten minutes later. He stepped into the kitchen of his one-bedroom apartment, groggily slammed an off-brand coffee pod into his off-brand coffeemaker, and hopped in the shower. Fourteen minutes later, he was freshened up, had coffee in hand, and was generally feeling much more human.

Robert- Bob to his friends- stopped for a minute to check the traffic on his phone before heading out the door. He figured he would skip breakfast or maybe get it at the office, which was his plan every second morning. It was 7:41 by his phone- he didn't bother with a watch- when he pulled out of the parking lot in a deep blue 2011 Toyota Corolla. It was cool and slightly wet, average weather for DC in the middle of November.

As usual, he followed the monotone turn-by-turn instructions of Google Maps religiously, even though he'd probably driven this route enough times to do it blindfolded. He crossed a bridge over the Anacostia River and rolled with the dense traffic into the heart of Washington, DC. Something didn't feel quite right, but he ignored the feeling, and by 8:45 had already pulled into his usual parking spot.

Bob strode into the Solidity Solutions office within a few minutes of his usual time. Unusually, nobody greeted him at the door. Usually Mark, one of their database developers, would be standing by the door on his phone wasting the last few minutes before the actual work day playing a marijuana farming game. He would typically ask Bob about his project, and Bob would reply with a noncommittal answer.

But Mark was nowhere to be seen, and neither was Cindy, the receptionist. Bob shrugged and paid it little heed, continuing into the office proper. To his surprise everyone from the intern to the boss was gathered around the television at the far end of the room.

With possibilities from "funny cat video" to "team-building exercise" on his mind, Bob Donovan edged into the crowd trying to get a look. What was actually on the screen was about as far from that as it could get.

"What the hell is that?" he asked out loud, as a knee-jerk reaction. "It's a joke, right?"

The TV was tuned into CNN, where a breaking news report had interrupted whatever the normal programming had been. He recognized the landscape they were showing- a park just inland from the Patuxent River that he had been to multiple times. But it was the strange, rippling, bright _thing_ cutting across it that took his breath away. The best description he could think of was a twisted mirror crossed with a shimmering puddle, stretching across the park and into the sky.

"No, man, it's real," Mark said from beside him. "They're calling it a 'discontinuity', whatever that means. They're saying there could be another world on the other side."

"Could be," one of the interns emphasized. "Maybe it's just…" He trailed off, missing a suitable explanation.

The video feed changed to an extremely serious-looking Army general at what seemed to be an impromptu press conference.

" _As a precautionary measure, the surrounding area has been evacuated and the National Guard has been activated to secure the area. Again, I would like to stress that these are precautionary measures only; the discontinuity is stable and appears to be harmless in nature. Additionally, we are in contact with experts across the nation and around the world who are working diligently to determine the exact nature of this discontinuity."_

"Yeah, but what about what's on the other side?" Mark asked, real fear masked beneath artificial snark.

"It's not a gate to hell, Mark, you play too many video games," Bob dismissed. He wasn't entirely convinced it wasn't an impossibility.

 _At this point, we are urging citizens to stay calm and continue to go about their daily lives. The discontinuity is stable, the site is secure, we have no reason to believe there is any threat to safety or national security. With that being said, we are continuing to monitor the situation closely, and will continue to keep the public informed on any new developments._

"Hey, you heard the man, everything's under control," Alexandra Langwell- to most of the office, she was simply _the boss_ \- announced loudly. She put on a brave face, but most of them realized she was trying to convince herself as much as everyone else. "It's not the end of the world here, let's get down to business."

Deciding that the everyday need to pay the bills superseded any concern over the seemingly supernatural happenings less than fifty miles away, Bob shrugged, pushed it to the back of his mind, and headed to his cubicle.

* * *

By lunchtime, the day had already been declared the least productive in the three-year history of the company. No one could shake the strange happenings in their backyard out of their minds. Programmers tabbed between code editors and livestreams, the secretary constantly snuck glances at a feed on her phone, and Bob couldn't focus on the expenses and accounts on his screen with the speculations and announcements playing through his headphones.

Fear and curiosity were the order of the day, not focus and drive. Discontinuities were the topic of the day, not enterprise software solutions. Who could focus on delivering a product when the question of whether they were alone in the universe burned so brightly?

Bob headed out for lunch, which was his usual routine. Rather than going to his usual destination of the Dunkin Donuts downstairs, he wandered down the street trying to clear his head. He ended up at a small, slightly scungy but appetizingly smelling pizza-by-the-slice place four blocks down the road.

"You see that discontinuity thing out by the Pax River?" the owner/operator asked casually as Bob paid for his two slices of pepperoni and can of Diet Pepsi.

"Yeah, the whole office is talking about it. We've hardly gotten anything done all day."

"No kidding." As he handed back the change, he joked, "Hope it isn't an alien invasion, I just renovated my kitchen. Shame to have that all ruined."

"Well, I live out in Hillcrest, so they'll flatten my apartment first," Bob quipped back as he took his pizza and left. Like the pizza man, he threw a charade of humour over very real concern.

Bob was hungrier than he had realized- he hadn't eaten anything that day, having been caught up in the excitement and then spending the rest of the morning trying and failing to get a project budget in line. By the time he'd made it back to the office, all of the pizza and most of the Diet Pepsi was gone. It had been a surprisingly good meal, and he made a mental note to try the pizza place more often.

The sojourn had made him five minutes late, but nobody seemed to care. He settled back into his office, but once again found himself unable to make any headway. On a good day, he could really get into the flow and zip through figures with nothing else in the way, but today, it just wasn't happening. His mind wandered and the minutes ticked by.

"Hey, hey!" a voice called from just outside his office. Tara, one of the project managers, leaned through the threshold, ponytail hanging at an odd angle. "Bob!"

With a few taps on his phone, he muted the audio stream he'd been listening to, then took off his headphones. "Yeah?"

"Boss says go home," Tara told him with a shrug.

Mind still addled with a maelstrom of thoughts, he asked, "Really?"

"Yeah. Nobody's getting anything done, so, fuck it. We're shutting down for the day."

"I guess that makes sense," he admitted, but Tara had already disappeared. He pocketed his phone, shoved his headphones in his bag, then made sure his documents were closed and computer shut down before leaving. When he'd first joined the company, he'd left the system logged in overnight and caught unholy hell from IT because of it.

Half the office had already left before him. There were a few other people in the parking lot, but many of the cars had already gone. He suspected that the other two companies in their building had closed up earlier, but didn't spend much effort pondering. Instead, he got in his car and headed for home.

The traffic was slightly worse than usual, but he'd still be home far earlier than normal so he didn't mind so much. The radio was tuned to his usual classic rock station, which was a welcome reprieve from the barrage of speculation and reports that he had listened to for most of the day.

He was on Pennsylvania Avenue, almost to the bridge, when traffic ground to a halt. His first reaction was to sigh, thinking maybe someone had gotten distracted and driven into someone. Then Sweet Emotion, playing over the radio, was cut off and replaced with ear-piercing EAS tones. Like most of the drivers around him, he shut off the engine and stepped out almost instinctually, wondering what was going on.

A loud roar, like a jet airliner but much louder, echoed around them. Six flying machines that could only be described as sci-fi airships lumbered toward them from the east, the direction of the discontinuity. They were large and odd-looking, with long forward sections, bulkier aft sections and metal feathers emerging from the stern. Missile trails zipped down from above the clouds to meet them, and the sounds of explosions and gunfire echoed in the distance. The wavering tone of a civil defense siren cut through the din and underscored it all.

The regular day had become anything but.


	2. Day Zero In Atlas

This is a counterpoint to the previous entry, following the same events from another perspective.

* * *

 **Tales Of The Lost**

 **Day Zero In Atlas**

It was the end of the week, and Zareen Dal was _seriously_ looking forward to the weekend.

It had been a hectic work week at the Lost Hills Forge. Situated near the eastern edge of Atlas, the small manufacturing house primarily built specialized weaponry and armor for the Atlesian military. Not exclusively, and not as a policy, but that had been their main source of business for the last decade or so of the company's 21-year history.

The military _was_ the biggest client in Atlas, after all.

This week, though, they hadn't been building much of anything. A key part of the production process, their Metal-Dust Directed Beam Sintering machine, refused to start up Monday morning. One of the workers was an experienced gunsmith who figured the MDDBS wasn't any more complicated and managed to "fix" the problem.

Zareen had walked in that morning just in time to watch the hundred-thousand-lien machine spectacularly disassemble itself. She told herself repeatedly that the gunsmith meant well, he really did. And some of his guns really were works of art. But she was the chief (and, nominally, only) technician at the forge, and it was up to her to clean up the mess.

Literally. She found part of the focusing assembly mangled beyond repair _at the other end of the building_.

Cue five days of overtime rebuilding the MDDBS essentially from scratch. The outer chassis, about the size of a van, could be patched up. The bed was twisted, but the manufacturer was able to bend it back into shape, saving them thousands of lien and weeks of lead time for a new one. Everything else was basically a lost cause, from the beam source to the servo drives to the roller rack. Even the main control board hadn't been spared, fried to a crisp by a feedback pulse.

She got the machine assembled by the end of the last afternoon. She'd left at eleven the previous night, came in at six, and was pretty much living off military-grade energy tablets by that point. They'd brought in two contract technicians to help finish the job, and the owner (to his credit) had spent most of the week calling in connections for special deals and rush jobs.

After exhaustively checking over every aspect of the rebuilt fabricator, Zareen stepped back, pulled off her grimy work gloves, and cranked the power switch a half turn to the on position. The machine whirred, whined, and groaned as it started up, but they were good sounds, correct sounds. It was initializing everything and running a diagnostic, so far so good.

A few minutes later, diagnostic finished with a happy chirp, the holographic control panel proclaiming success.

Zareen smiled broadly at the only people left in the building; the owner, one of the contract techs, and the gunsmith who had attempted the original repair. "We did it."

"You did it," the owner corrected. "Will it work?"

"Everything checks out," she told him. "There shouldn't be any problems, but I'd still like to be there for the first test forging on Monday."

"Fair enough."

And with that, the job was done. She headed off the floor, past the breakroom to the locker room. After picking up a few things, she locked herself in the tiny, run-down shower. It was usually ice cold, and today was no different, but she didn't matter. She felt a million times better after scrubbing down and changing into her street clothes.

Zareen checked her scroll as she stepped out of the building. Something about a strange mirror-like anomaly out past the edge of the city making headlines, but she scrolled past that. It was 6:43 in the evening, and… yes! If she hurried, she'd be able to catch the game with her friends, and the Amethyst Chargers- her favourite team- were playing tonight. It would be a great way to cap off a stressful if ultimately successful week.

Decision made, she hiked four blocks uphill to Springdale station. She popped her scroll into the slot at the fare gate, it did nothing, she cursed and tried the one next to it. That worked, and she breezed through the open gate and onto the platform. Five minutes later, she was on a train racing toward the downtown heart of Atlas.

While the station had seen better days, the train was almost brand new, one of the recent upgrades to Atlas's world-leading transit system. It still had that fresh smell, was almost the right temperature, the seats were large and comfortable, and holographic displays put on a show of tasteful art and public service announcements. Zareen leaned back and watched the bright lights of the city zip by.

 _The next station is Canterwood-Illumos_ , a robotic voice helpfully announced. That was her stop. The train was about half full, and she slipped by a portly man rather inconsiderately standing by the doorway on her way out.

If she had continued another two stops, she'd be right in the high-tech, high-wealth core of the city, with all its gleaming glass and neon lights. That was too rich for her blood, though, so she turned and headed a block and a half the other direction where the buildings were smaller, older, and less impressive. Her destination, The Red Bastion, was much like its neighbours, with a tattered awning, faded sign and windows that were never quite clean.

But with an eight-foot holoscreen, a good selection of tasty if unhealthy finger food, and reasonably priced Stalwart on tap, it was the best place they knew of when it came to watching Rockball. It smelled like booze, it was dimly lit, and noisy as heck, but it was practically home.

"Zareen!" a familiar voice called from near the back. "You made it!"

She made her way toward the table. Alani was on the far right, the diminutive orange-eyed verdette four mugs down with a wide smile on her face. Luka looked glum staring into the distance, halfway through a glass of something brown and fizzy and fingers tapping nervously, but she could tell he was having a good time. Kadir idly smoothed his forest green beard with one hand while grabbing a handful of chips with the other. That left…

"Cole didn't show?" Zareen asked as she sat down.

"Nope."

She shrugged and poured herself a glass of ale from the flagon in the middle of the table. "His loss, then."

Zareen had missed the opening ceremonies, but made it in time for the launch. The two teams, her favoured Amethysts and the Green Mace RC from Vale, were arranged each on their own side of the field. They formed a veritable rainbow from the air, with the Amethysts primarily decked out in pink-purple and the Greeners in brilliant lime, but a wide variety of personal adornments dotted their uniforms.

It looked random to the casual observers, but where each player was placed was a carefully considered decision. Her favourite player (and, as was endlessly teased, possible crush) Violetta Dalen was a hard-hitter placed near the front, easily identified by her deep purple streamers on the big screen. Argyr Plios, a recent transfer that Alani especially was cheering on, was a runner, closer to the back.

The Greeners were launching first. In principle, Rockball was simple. Two teams, fourteen players, angular wooden sticks and a small but very hard ball (allegedly it had originally been a rock picked up off the ground). Get the ball through the forked goalposts by any means necessary, up to and including physical violence. In practice, like any sport that had been played for any length of time, it had evolved a great deal of complex minutiae. The team with the lower standing always launched first, from two thirds of the way down the field, and no contact between players was allowed until the ball hit the ground.

The team kept their usual launcher in reserve, instead bringing out a tall woman with candy cane hair that none of them recognized. With a twirl and a flourish, she whacked the ball across the field, starting the game. Players on both teams maneuvered aggressively but carefully, balancing the need for an advantageous position with the risk of a foul.

A tough looking Greener- Carmine Fal-something or other, Zareen half-remembered- caught the ball in her gloved hands and bolted forward, making it about five paces before the Amethyst hitter Forest Jedlicka took her legs out from under her with an expert swing of his stick, then sent the ball flying downfield with another expert swing.

"Good hit!" Alani shouted excitedly, pumping an arm and spilling beer all over the table.

Zareen merely smiled and took a swig from her mug.

One of the Amethyst runners- was that Alben Kelly?- rushed into position only to have the ball land on his head and send him sprawling. An opposing defender took the opportunity to grab the ball. That elicited a few groans and shouts of derision from the audience in the bar. But as he set up for a forward pass, Violetta came in from the side with surprising speed and swung her stick into his chest, sending him flying one way and the ball the other.

"Yes!" Zareen shouted in excitement.

Violetta caught it and bolted towards the goals, streamers flying, but the other two Greener defenders were converging on her rapidly. There was a reason Violetta was a hitter, not a runner, after all. But she was moving like a freight train, and-

The feed went dead, screen blank and the bar briefly silent. The silence was quickly replaced by angry shouting as the bartender feverishly tried to get the signal back.

"Hey, what happened to the game?" Luka shouted angrily.

Zareen added, "Yeah, what the hell?"

"It's nothing on our end here," the bartender tried to explain over the roar of angry patrons. Zareen barely heard him.

Suddenly, the screen came alive again. The image of the stadium and players was gone, however, replaced with the somber visage of General Ironwood.

"Killjoy!" someone in the bar shouted.

The General's face was stony as he addressed the kingdom. "Citizens of Atlas. As many of you are aware, a strange anomaly appeared west of city limits early this afternoon. We did not, and still do not, believe this is related to Grimm activity. However, there is another civilization on the other side of the anomaly, and unfortunately, they appear to be hostile. They have already attacked and destroyed our peaceful scouts. We are now at war with an unknown enemy. Our response will be swift and decisive. I trust that each and every one of you will do your duty, and I am confident that we will emerge victorious. Thank you."

And with that, Zareen Dal's week had gone fully and completely to hell.

* * *

Let me know what you think, of both this and the fanime.


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